The Rabbit Factory [Paperback]

Domino, for example, is an ex-con who makes deliveries for a gangster named Mr. Hamburger; Hamburger employs Frankie, a button man who keeps hooker Anjalee as his on-hold skeezer; elderly Arthur meets both Anjalee and Frankie as he worries about his straying wife, Helen, who longs for pet shop clerk Eric; Eric was once acquainted with a one-armed man named Nub who recently hooked up with Miss Muffet, a woman who looks after a demonic dog for Mr. Hamburger, and so on....

It took me a while to get into the book -- it takes some time to get acclimated to all the different characters and you've got to get used the way Brown jumps from place to place and person to person.

But once that's out of the way, the stories speed by. Brown is a master at getting you hooked into one story, then shifting to another one that gradually becomes just as engrossing. He also creates characters that are deeply flawed but surprisingly sympathetic: case in point -- Domino D'Alamo, a dope-dealing, cop-killing no good who will stop at nothing to accomplish his goal (basically "deliver the weed and get paid.") Despite his Tuco-esque flaws, I kept catching myself rooting for him. And in his last scene, when his ridiculous but terrible fate is revealed, I genuinely felt sad.

The usual Brown trademarks are here -- perfectly crafted scenes that look deceptively easy; vivid depictions of men and women and land and violent activity; Brown's obsessions with and depictions of drinking, smoking, money, sex and food. And yet the book also finds the author going in a few different directions, as well, writing about people and places that don't ordinarily wind up in his fiction.

The book isn't perfect. It's a little indulgent and some strands feel incomplete; some of the characters fare better than others -- I never really got too interested in the adventures of college professor Merlot and his law enforcement squeeze Penelope, and I wondered if it was really necessary for Anjalee *and* Helen *and* Miss Muffet to be such man-hunting barflies.

But overall, it's a series of compelling stories and it's good to be back with Brown's kooky brokenhearts and badasses, and to see a great writer branching off into new territories -- whom among his fans would've thought a whale would enter into one of his tales?

In a series of interlocking stories, Larry Brown artfully weaves together the lives of several characters, all inhabiting (all temporarily) Memphis. None have had good luck recently, and only Arthur--a former oil tycoon, now 70, in retirement, facing impotency, and trying to hold on to his 40 year old wife--seems to have ever had any.

A mobster from Chicago has his privates mangled by a post hole digger; his one legged maid has her leg stolen in her battle with the family poodle; a good looking hooker looses two sugar daddy's, and is then arrested for assaulting an abusive nurse working at an old folk's home; a navy man, whose ship kills a whale, and who then suffers brain damage in an unofficial boxing match; and an ex-con, who really, really tries to go straight, but suffers a series of comic mishaps that turn him into first a murderer, and then food for lions (just in case the Rabbit factory image hasn't sunk in yet).

At the end, two of the plot lines remain unresolved. Will Helen stop drinking and running around and return to Arthur, who (probably) still loves her? Will the beautiful hooker stay with the brain damaged boxing naval man? Can anyone ever find happiness?

Or are we all, including authors who labor long over a book only to have it read and then discarded, simply grist for some cosmic rabbit factory we call existence.

More readable than Waiting for Godot, and far more entertaining--but the point seems the same--there is no point.